Question

For your discussion post this week, imagine you are working as an assistant in a small behavioral health office. Your supervisor has recently decided to begin counseling and assisting families and couples, in addition to working with individuals. You become concerned one day when you overhear your supervisor say “working with families, couples, and individuals is all the same! Once you know how to counsel individuals, assisting a family or a couple is no biggie.”

In your initial post, please address the following:

• Compare and contrast offering human services to individuals with offering services to couples and families.Summarize your post by indicating whether you agree with your supervisor’s comments in the scenario above. Is human and social services provision the same regardless of whether one is working with individuals, couples, or families?
  • Explain the ethical and legal considerations that apply to human services delivery more generally (whether working with an individual client, a couple, or a family).
  • Analyze the ethical and legal considerations that apply specifically to delivering human and social services to couples and families.

In answering these questions, try to use the lecture material, personal and professional experience, and/or a Google search for ethical issues in working with couples and families to support your reasoning.

Answer 1

Offering counseling and other human services to couples and families is significantly different than offering them to individuals.

Venturing briefly into the aspect of counseling before getting into the ethical and legal considerations, it can be seen that individuals seeking counseling could have very different reasons for doing so, than the reasons of couples and families. The focus of the problem when it comes to counseling individuals is likely to be something specific to the individual, for instance, anxiety. On the other hand, the focus of the problem when it comes to counseling couples and families is more likely to be something interpersonal, such as dysfunctional patterns of communication adopted by both the partners. The case conceptualization in both the cases will employ different theories. For instance, Bowen's Transgenerational Model may be used for a case conceptualization when working with a family, while a Cognitive Behavioural Model is more likely to be used when concepualizing an individual's case.

Now, getting into the general ethical and legal considerations when it comes to providing human services delivery, a few points are to be considered vital. These are respecting the confidentiality of the client and his/her concerns; respecting the autonomy of the client, i.e., accepting their choices irrespective of whether they support the counselor's perspective or agenda; ensuring the safety of the client and working towards his/her well-being; creating and sustaining a definite level of trust in the patient-counselor relationship. Another important point to be considered is that the client and the therapist are involved only at a professional level and do not seek to forge any personal bonds outside the purview of the therapeutic alliance. Legal implications come to play when there is a threat of self-harm or harm to others on part of the client, as assessed or anticipated by the therapist. In such a case and only in such a case may the therapist break the agreement of confidentiality to ensure help for the concerned person.

Now, talking about the specific ethical and legal considerations when it comes to providing human and social services to couples and families, the very first consideration is the qualification of the service provider himself/herself. The service provider must be adequately trained and certified to administer therapy or other human and social services to couples and families. Another consideration is related to the informed consent of all the participating parties who attend one or more of the therapy sessions. The therapist must ensure the informed consent of each member of the family who participates in the session. A third specific consideration is related to neutrality, which warrants striking a balance among the different alliances being managed by the service provider with each of the members. It should not be that the service provider displays a bias towards or against any of the participating members because that will dilute the trust of one or more members in the service provider. Sometimes, one of the members may make an extra effort to draw the service provider to their side. The service provider needs to be uninfluenced by such efforts. Also important is considering the varying needs of each member of the family and finding a way to reconcile these different needs, without harming or ignoring any one member.

Through these points, it becomes clear that providing human and social services to individuals requires a different skill set than providing human and social services to couples and families. Experience in one cannot be interchanged with experience in the other as well.